EPA officials met with some of Butte’s most vocal Superfund cleanup activists yesterday to update them on the activists’ goal to restore Upper Silver Bow Creek.

For years, members of the local Restore Our Creek Coalition have been saying that Butte’s Superfund cleanup won’t be complete unless Upper Silver Bow Creek is re-constructed as a free-flowing stream where kids can fish and play, after nearly a century of serving as a wastewater ditch.

Montanans in Missoula, Billings and Kalispell today joined nationwide protests against abortion bans in southern states.

At the Missoula County Courthouse speakers expressed outrage over legislation in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and Missouri to a crowd of about 200 people.

The Montana Department of Justice announced plans Tuesday to hire a new specialist focusing on missing persons cases in the state. The position was created during the last legislative session amid public outcry over the high rate of Native American women and girls who are murdered or go missing.

A Montana Highway Patrol trooper who was shot three times while investigating a fatal Missoula shooting in mid-March is scheduled to return home Wednesday, and the public is invited to join a processions in Missoula and Stevensville welcoming him back.

The most recent effort to develop a better fire shelter for wildland firefighters produced nothing new, but don’t tell U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Fire Safety Specialist Ted Mason the five-year research project was a bust.

"Absolutely not," Mason said. "I’m looking at it like we’ve proved that we did a really good job in 2002 when we created the shelter we’re currently using."

The next time you discover a new restaurant that you love, try telling your friends about it through interpretive dance.

That’s what you would do if you were a honeybee.

Public comment ends this week on a Forest Service project near Whitefish which proposes to use so-called “good neighbor authority” to collaborate with the State of Montana. It’s a new approach that could mark a shift in which parties get a say in managing national forests.